School of Art, Design & Technology

www.srishtiblr.org

Locative Media/Arts Workshop 2004

pARTicipate!

This workshop is of interest to anyone seeking to explore ways of generating new data and ways of envisioning & representing it, as well as investigating how the new & emerging media & technologies can be leveraged to generate new forms & aesthetics. 

This means it could be of interest to urban planners, entrepreneurs, programmers, journalists, cartographers, environmentalists, social workers, social researchers, artists, designers, technologists… to name only a few.

Approach & Concept

During the period January 5th to the 21st 2005 we aim to bring together a group of artists, technologists and new media designers from many different countries to work with 120 students and faculty on 10 projects that will form the basis of these initiatives. We do hope that you will join us in this endeavor and become one of our partners - not only in the workshops but also in taking the learning from the workshop forward.

“Locative media may be understood to mean media in which context is crucial, in that the media pertains to specific location and time, the point of spatio-temporal ‘capture’, dissemination or some point in between. The term locative media has also been associated with mobility, collaborative mapping, and emergent forms of social networking.”

This definition, which can be found on any web site on locative media, gives an idea of the purpose that drives our workshop. Srishti would like to engage with ideas of cultural geographies, oral and narrative histories, information visualization and participative design pedagogies in conjunction with new media and in particular the positioning technologies. Our endeavour is to move talking to learning through immersion and actual field experimentation. 

Project Ideas

Given below is a list of projects which are to be read as indicative of the nature of the inquiry planned. However, these are still under discussion & development with the resource persons leading the workshops.

• Map ecosystems of the Putenahalli Lake - a bird sanctuary - and assess the impact of current & possible human activity on it

• Map how informal economies around the proposed Devanahalli Airport project being planned around 30 km from Bangalore

• Map changing raw material sources and markets of traditional craft

• Map one's self in subjective dimensions. 'study of the apparently 'un-mappables' including tsunami

We would like draw up a list of around 12-15 projects which provide a rich area for collaborative cartography and contextual learning, and eventually filter down to four or five umbrella projects that have the potential to be taken much beyond the three-week workshop timeframe via collaborative projects.

Resource Persons

We have a list of people from India and abroad who have indicated that they would like to participate in this workshop. They represent a wide range of interests from artists to hackers.

1. Ravi Gupta & team, CSDMS, GIS and Participatory Development, Editor I4D. Ravi was part of the team that digitised land records and made them accessible to remotely-located rural persons via a chain of kiosks.
2. Rustam Vania, environmental educator-designer-activist from Centre for Science & Environment - involving students/communities in mapping local eco-processes. 
3. Joanne Walsh - from London UK - Freelance Perl Programmer and Software Artist; designer of mudlondon -a semantic web collaborative mapping experiment and co-founder of locative media.net.
4. Jason Harlan from San Francisco USA - a mathematics and cognitive science graduate who has worked extensively in usability and mapping; co-founder of blogmapper and co-founder of locative media.net.
5. Schuyler Erle is a programmer/technologist committed to the Open Source movement, and has worked extensively in using locative/GIS technologies. He is associated with Marko Pehljam, the chief protagonist of the Macrolab project.
6. Jorge Menna Barreto lives in Brazil. Since 1997, the artist has been working on site specific practices. His approach has led him to start a research at the University of São Paulo in 2003 in the MFA program. He is also a professor at the University ULBRA in the course of Fine Arts.

Nature and Structure of the workshop

The workshop will be of three weeks duration and will start on January 5th and end of January 21st 2005.The idea at the moment is to work at two levels - an expert and a novice level.

The three weeks will be organised as “Teach/Train - Research - Visualize/Publish” modules, each lasting approximately one week. It is hoped that at the end of the workshop two or three strands of work will get translated into large scale collaborative projects.